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Published - Government

The final version of the important Digital Agenda for Europe has been leaked – and shows that the European Commission has betrayed open standards. Where an earlier draft had an entire section headed “Open Standards and Interoperability”, the latest version only uses the word “open” once in the corresponding section “Interoperability and standards.”

This is the full text of the essay I wrote for the O'Reilly Open Government book, in which I discuss what open file formats and other digital standards really mean for us, why they are often even more important than Free Software and why Government must lead the way when it comes to their adoption.

Back in 2007, the USA, EU, Switzerland and Japan started the negotiations to create an international agreement on intellectual property rights, the claimed goal was to reduce the trade of counterfeit goods and pirated copyright protected works through a legislative framework. The agreement is now known as Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement or ACTA.

WhiteHouse.gov released custom code used to develop their open platform built on Drupal. The majority of the code used in the web site of the White House is already open source, but developers are now releasing new code -distributed as Drupal modules- in order to benefit others.

The EU's member states have just thrown their weight behind the principles of Open Standards and interoperability. At a meeting of the ministers for telecommunication and information society in Granada, Spain, the ministers of the 27 EU member states yesterday issued the Granada Ministerial Declaration on the European Digital Agenda.

Bucharest (RO), October 2009 -- The Romanian Ministry of Education and Research has launched the ``The Teacher - Educational Software Developer'' strategic project that is to be implemented between September 2009 - September 2011 (24 months). The target of the project is three million pupils around the country.

The United States' newly-created "Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator" asked for public comments on a Joint Strategic Plan to make copyright enforcement more effective. The FSF submitted an argument that the government should adopt free software and encourage its use elsewhere to provide more freedom to computer users and reduce the need for such enforcement.

Red Hat? SUSE Linux? Apache? MySQL? These are bad, evil, un-American entities. Apparently. They and the rest of those dirty rotten open-source software scoundrels are responsible for a "tidal wave of losses in U.S. jobs and competitiveness."